Hi my name is Daniel Rogge and we're going to talk about your first day with PathPilot today.
So here I have a PCNC 770 As if i had just set everything up
for the first time, just plugged in the controller and i'm ready to kind of get
familiar with the control software. I'm going to walk you through those steps.
When you first plug in your controller it'll boot right up to this
screen End User License Agreement, we'll go ahead and agree to that, then it'll ask me
what machine I want to configure the software for. So we've got a Series 3 770.
I'm going to choose that, but I do want to show you that if you
had an older machine, PathPilot supports all existing variants of our machines.
So here I am, 770 Series 3, I'll go ahead and check that.
The mill interface is up. Of course,
if we had picked a lathe you'd see the lathe interface. A couple things to note
real quick, the software is divided into kind of two main groups
this group down at the bottom, these are all persistent controls they're going to
stay there through the entirety of your session. Up at the top we have a Notebook,
so you have different tabs for different functions and we'll go through a few of
those today in this video. First thing you want to do, now that we have the
interface up, we'll bring the machine out of e-stop and power it on.
And we see this flashing reset button. We're going to go ahead and click that and that
establishes communication with the machine.
And it's always a good idea to
get in the habit of referencing the machine right out of you right after you
bring it out e-stop. Anytime you've e-stopped the machine the drives are deep powered
and they're going to forget where they were so you're going to want to go ahead
and reference it back to its home switches. So go ahead and reference X,Y and Z there
So I'm going to give you a quick tour of some of the highlights of
the interface that you'll need to get started here. This third of the screen
here with the cycle start button at the top all the way down through the
overrides these are all controls that you'd use while running a g-code program
so cycle start will start a g-code program
a single block will allow you to step through one line of code at the time.
The rest of these buttons are all documented in the manual, but this is stuff that
you're going to use while running a program. This group here we have our work
offset coordinates. There's a video that you might like on work offsets.
These display the machine position relative to your work coordinate zero. You can click
into them. You can type a value. I can type minus 3 right and hit enter. It also accepts
math so I get minus 3, minus 0.5. Right? Will give me minus 3.5, or if I want it I
could click in there and just slash two, to divide that value by 2. So it accepts
mathematical expressions in those DRO's. One thing you do want to be aware
of, you really want to hit enter when you're done in here. If I type something
in here, and then I go somewhere else, that value doesn't take.
These labels here, DTG is Distance To Go. So it displays the distance left in any
remaining move. Right now it's not moving at all, so they're all zero and these are
your reference buttons. Buttons to zero out your work offset coordinate system.
Like I said, that's covered in another video. Here we have manual controls so
this allows you to choose the stepside size for jogging. If we're jogging the
machine, and also allows you to switch between continuous jogging, and step jogging.
Here we have some spindle controls, Forward starts the spindle in
forward mode. Reverse starts at reverse. You can enter in the RPM here etc and
then we have a feed rate do you can change the feed rate spindle range since
the belt position of the spindle. And the very end here, we've got the tool DRO
that allows you to..if I had a tool in the machine, I'd type that tool number in
And go to G30, a G30 is a position, typically we use it for tool change position but
it's an assignable position anywhere. That's the bottom portion of the screen here.
Up along the top, the main screen is probably where you're
going to spend, the main tab's where you'll spend most of your time and
what we have here is the g-code listing. If I had a g-code file loaded you'd see g-code
there, so we'll go ahead and load this up. And you'll see the actual machine code.
Right? And you can scroll down through there.
This is the toolpath display, and you can right click in here to choose different
views, so we have an isometric view. You see a top view, front view.
I like the isometric view. It gives you a good idea of what's going to happen.
Also, you'll see that the extents of travel, how far the machine will have to move in
order to execute this program are listed which is pretty handy and our few other
things here that are discussed the manuals you can change the grid spacing
stuff like that.
This, here is the MDI line. You'll see those little gray
letters MDI. If we click into it this allows me to input single G code
commands, right in there so for instance if I want to run the machine metric.
The code for millimeter units is G21. I could just type G21. Now the machine you see
is displaying millimeter values. So if you program in metric, G 21.
You can either type it right into your MDI line, or you could include it at the
beginning of any of your G code files. That'll put the machine into metric.
I prefer to program in inch. I'm going to change it back with a G20 command.
But we can type any valid G code command we want into that MDI line, and it's as if
we were running a tiny one line long G code program.
there are a couple other things you can do with the MDI line.
These are discussed in in other videos,
but I'll run it now. We could we could search the g-code files. So if Iwant to find
where the spindle turns on I could type in Find M3 and that'll find instances of
the g-code where the spindle M3 command is. Where I have a couple
keywords in here and find tool that will find my tool changes.
File screen is relatively self-explanatory.
And carrying files over to your computer on a USB stick.
So if we..got a little USB extension here.
Put that in and.. USB Drive will show up over here.
And you'll see all my files on here.
Now we could copy a file over relatively easy. Copy from USB and then
that will show up over here. And it's got all the functions you'd expect from a
file tab. You can rename folders.You can make new folders. You can delete files
rename them. There is a little preview here, so we could take a look.
Take a look at different..I'm going to see if I have some code...
It'll take a look at different G codes here and as I
click on them, you'll be able to read the first few lines of the g-code file
If we go to the settings screen, this just allows you to select some of the options
you may have with your machine. So for instance, this machine is equipped with
an ATC but if I were changing tools manually
I'd select the manual tool change option. Passive probe versus a digitizing probe
Perhaps you have a fourth axis homing kit etc. Over on this portion we'll see
that we're displaying the active G codes it's also kind of a nice cheat sheet if
you forget that G zero is a rapid position move you see it written out
here in plain English. Uh, G20 and G21, which we looked at earlier today when I
was typing into the MDI line, you'll see g20 is active. It's highlighted in yellow.
If we went back in and made G21 active, you'd see over here that now G21 is highlighted.
The rest of these screens are covered in detail in other videos we've
got a long video on tool and work offsets. There's another video on the
conversational screens.There's a video on probing so I just wanted to cover
the basics today. We talked about G code files.We talked about the MDI line.
Talked a bit about the program control group. I'll go ahead and bring this back into inch units.
So that was a real brief overview of the PathPilot user interface.
Next step if you're on the learning
curve for CNC, or just learning the PathPilot interface, would be to go to the
first part section of the manual, and we have a video on it as well,
just covers making your very first part with PathPilot. We've got a video for
lathe, and a video for mill. And from there you might look into tool offsets,
work offsets, some of the more advanced topics.
For more tips and tricks, we have a number of videos over here.
And please do subscribe to our channel here.
Thank you very much.